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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
That's it? He didn't even, like, celebrate his death.
Seems like Nexstar is trying to butter up Trump for some deal that needs governmental approval in the future.
I actually think celebration would be less cancel-worthy than blatantly spreading misinformation like that. I don't know if there's enough leeway in judgment calls to say that Kimmel really believed that the murderer was a MAGA, or that this being a comedy show meant that it was not meant to be taken seriously (really, I don't know the laws around this - does the fact that the joke relies on an implicit statement of fact play into it?), but it looks like FCC pressure just from public comments may have played into the decision, which is the part I find troubling. I'd hope the owners would have enough decency to do this independently, but we'll never know, I suppose. But celebrating his death, that I'd see as simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones, which got his Politically Incorrect show canceled, IIRC, unfairly, IMHO.
He shouldn't have said it, especially as it turns out to have been wrong, but to take him off the air for it in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.
Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?
Not OP but I think it's an open question as to whether the number of Trump's lies, in absolute terms, is greater or less than other politicians, but I don't really think it's too important to close it with an answer, I don't care about it per se.
However, it seems completely obvious that the lies he tells are particularly... maybe "brazen" is the right word? Like in real life people tell white lies, and usually don't get caught. Trump tells white lies, and regularly does get caught, when prior presidents and many other public figures are often careful enough that they, on the whole, seem to lay off the white lies (silence works pretty well for most administrations, in fact almost equally as well in situations where a white lie would otherwise attempt to hide an awkward truth, they both hide it in effect).
The usual defense amounts to one of three things: 1) Trump's words were hyperbole or maybe technically incorrect, but the broader truth is correct so the precise verbiage doesn't matter, 2) Trump was just relaying his understanding based on other reports/TV/hearsay, and any incorrectness is a simple lack of due diligence, which is fine because again his broader points are correct and people can be wrong sometimes, 3) Well if you look at what he said earlier or later or some other day, that clarifies things, that's what he really meant, obviously he was just riffing off that, and we should kind of average all his statements. No particular word, phrase, or claim ever has absolute meaning.
You know, honestly I was lowkey fine with this during election season, and in a number of cases I defended Trump (!) by saying that in an election it really does matter more what people hear than what you say. We all even expect it, fact-checker mania or no. However, I (and most liberals and even most centrists even despite any biases) think that when governing the words you say have special meaning. We can't and shouldn't be guessing. It's not like the Bible where reasonable people can disagree if X scripture is literal or metaphorical or symbolic or something in between! A word has meaning. Sometimes flexible, but all meanings can be stretched so far as to break. As an example, Trump said the fired BLS chief "rigged" the numbers. That means something, and it's not a Biblical interpretation situation. Factually, by any definition, Trump was wrong. She did not rig the numbers. End of story. The End. There is no wiggle room there. So which is it, 1, 2, or 3? They have some partial explanatory power. I admit that. But they do not actually change the lie.
It's the President and he has a responsibility. Sure, Presidents lie. Some have told some really, really big whoppers. But by and large, as I said above, that's usually about the big stuff. Trump's statements are frequently wrong about the small stuff.
How bad is one versus the other? Hypothetically is it better to have a habitual fibber who is honest about the big stuff, or a charming fact-wielding guy hiding a devastating betrayal? I have no firm opinion, and to be fair it's a little bit of new territory, and with a yet-unwritten and unrevealed history to match. Will we discover a Trump Iran-Contra under our noses and thus have the worst of both worlds? Does anything so far count? No one can say yet for sure.
However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO). I think it's justified to be dismayed about that and worried about it. Because there's a significantly wide, if not deep, "interaction surface" on the utterings of Presidents to the public. They are literally the most newsworthy person in the world, so a lot gets transmitted. Trump's white lies, even if that's really all they are (not a given but let's roll with it), do immense damage to this trust. Suddenly, rather than more limited debates about whether the government is telling the truth about specific and big things, we suddenly are expected to guess whether the government is telling the truth about small things, tiny things, mundane things. We are expected to produce custom weighted-average factual conclusions based on contradictory government information releases. That's exhausting.
Conservatives aren't really bothered by this because they mostly have delegated their decision-making to Trump and his administration, since they trust that he will not betray them overall, so the small stuff is almost irrelevant. They even tend to enjoy Trump cynically playing with those assumptions to make the traditional media dance to his pleasure. But if you put yourself in anyone else's shoes, it's a pretty terrible state of affairs.
A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?
Trump lies like your uncle telling fish stories. Understanding this dynamic creates trust by generating low-stakes opportunities to display ingroup loyalty. All the right has to do to gain this benefit is not crash out whenever Trump calls something "the greatest show" because "AKSHUALLY EXPERTS SAY IT WAS ONLY THE FOURTH GREATEST SHOW".
And even more so by presumptively taking most claims of Trump lying as themselves lies. I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking (I don't think either of them managed to word themselves accurately when they were arguing about the deficit over their comparative terms, but I think Trump was less wrong), or claims that were defensible/true but that Democrats don't like.
And this matters in a context when trust has already been completely destroyed. Remember "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" That was a blatant, meaningful, painful lie. The self-appointed "fact-checkers" called it absolutely true, then slowly walked it back until after Obama's re-election when they admitted it was the "Lie of the Year".
Shit, "Obama has a healthcare plan" was a straight up lie! He literally just let his speechwriters write a check his policy team couldn't cash because he assumed Hilary was going to be the nominee anyway!
The cost is entirely to you. Every time a respectable outlet melts down over something that didn't happen (because they default assume that Trump MUST be lying about everything), you guys lose trust and respect and a few more people realize that NYT and WaPo and CNN are on the same level as Glenn Beck at his worst.
This whole post is just Blue Team being mad that they can't lie with impunity and nasty consequences to Red Team anymore.
The loss of trust in media is in good part self-inflicted yes. I think the conflation of facts with fact-checks, and the laundering of political opinion as fact was not good. For example, NPR lit its own listener trust on fire over the years, even if it was more a slow burn.
Still, a government official - the ultimate government official - should never be mistaken for a friendly uncle. He's currying ingroup loyalty at the explicit cost of more general trust destruction. That's exactly my point, and it's a bad trade. A lot of these utterances are magnified by broader traditional media yes, but they are actually said. While in years past someone suspicious of media spin could go back and just watch the original remarks directly to get the original truth, in recent years often listening to Trump directly leaves you less informed and more confused, with more effort to untangle the web. In short, although the perception of Trump's lies is worse than the reality, the reality of Trump's lies are also worse than prior past. Both are bad. I hate this idea that we need to choose one and only one person or organization or group to blame. And at the end of the day, no one elected the news but the President has special power and his wording matters more, so with greater power comes greater responsibility.
(IIRC that's a bit of an oversimplification of the Obamacare strategy. The original Politifact lie of the year article probably summed it up best: "Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best." Yep, seems about right. So to be more specific, everyone really knew that the legislative effort would require a lot of changes to pass Congress, so I don't really think it's fair to ding 2007 Obama for the that. 2011 Obama and 2014 Obama, things are different.)
No, it's a fine trade because the general trust was utterly non-existent among the red tribe. Again, this complaint is Lucy crying "why won't you let me lie to you forever, Charlie Brown?"
Joe Biden goes utterly senile in office and the nation is run by a shadowy cabal of unnamed, unelected staffers and the real problem is the entitled electorate having the gall to ask questions about it.
George Bush lies us into Iraq (with a critical assist from the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, aka the man who handpicked the liars for the hearings), resulting in a million dead brown people, torching trillions of dollars from the treasury, destabilizing a large chunk of the world, terroristic blowback, total loss of America's moral standing in the world, sparking resentment and contempt from our allies and leaving us dangerously weak for the future. Totally fine, respectable elder statesman. Don't you know he paints?
Meanwhile, Trump says he has the biggest inauguration ever and he's a threat to democracy, a fascist, literally Hitler.
Sorry bro. You guys are just not serious people. Trump's lies are emphatically far from worse than the past, and they're still much less severe than the ones his enemies tell every day.
Man, that was like a whole paragraph to admit that everything I said was completely true, but still somehow pretend that you disputed it. Still better than average for a hack outfit like Politifact.
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This is a much better metaphor than "Trump lies like a used car salesman." Used car salesmen do not, in fact, lie "like used car salesmen" (although some private used car sellers do).
The main reason why "is Trump a liar" is a scissor is that Trump tells fish tales in contexts where nobody else does, and his supporters don't see it as a problem. The cleanest example is the Letitia James commercial fraud litigation - Trump's people said in a mortgage application (where lying is a crime) that his personal real estate portfolio was THIS BIG, private bankers who are used to working with Trump and wanted to humour him pretended to believe them, Letitia James prosecuted the Trump organisation for lying on a mortgage application, the judge treated the lies as real lies intended to deceive (because that is what the law says, and what would be going on if anyone other than Donald Trump lied in a commercial mortgage application), and Trump's supporters were outraged that their guy could be punished for telling what was obviously a fish tale.
You can tell a similar story about golf cheating, economic statistics, Sharpiegate, pet-eating Haitians, and even the results of the 2020 election.
A yuge part of Trump's political success is that his reputation for fish tales creates a right wing version of "clown nose on, clown nose off" where he can make a false statement, act on it (or get other people to act on it), and then if it turns out not to be believable claim it was a fish tale all along. This creates as least as much outrage in his political opponents as OG "clown nose on, clown nose off" by MSM pseudo-comedians does in their political opponents.
In real-world angling, if you tell the neighbours that you caught a fifteen-pounder and invite them all round to dinner to eat it you are not allowed to serve up a tiddler and laugh at them for believing fish tales.
Yeah, all the "That's just Trump, that's the way it is" comes off as a bizarre gimme request by MAGA types to carve out an expection for lying for the most powerful man on the Earth, and it's even more bizarre that they don't appear to see how anyone else could even see it as bizarre.
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The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic
Not even a "misleading", which imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.
Wow, are they serious?
"Rittenhouse ran away from protesters after prosecutors say he had already shot and killed someone."
Yeah, and he also ran away from the someone he shot and killed, while the guy was chasing him and grabbing for his weapon and Rittenhouse was shouting "Friendly! Friendly! Friendly!", only turning to fire after he heard a gunshot behind him and spun around to find the guy still close behind and charging him.
I'm getting the impression that these guys might not actually have a principled interest in preventing the misleading omission of relevant facts.
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Yup. The fundamental problem with the "Trump is an unprecedented liar" claim is that leftwingers constantly and consistantly lie about the purported lies.
Almost like they don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality, just competing power narratives, and thus no obligation to even try to be accurate.
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